Art as we know it was not to be
found at the 1981 launching of the YATOO Outdoor Field Art Research
Association, which had developed out of the 1980 Geumgang Modern Art Festival.
Dong-sik Lim who played a leading role in the establishing of the Association
declared that one must "express the feelings or thoughts one has in
Geumgang (Geum River) in a non-drawing method." "YATOO is an
association for the research of outdoor art through fresh contact with nature.
Based on a strong love for nature, it celebrates nature’s spontaneously gradual
changes, its indefinite breadth and thickness, and every life force in
it," proclaims the founding statement. Oddly, the same aesthetic
characteristic is shown in Soon-im Kim's work. Kim has never claimed herself to
be a nature artist, nor does she take the aesthetics of nature art as her
ultimate goal. She knows 'how to draw' and 'how to make' and is fully aware of
how closely such methods are connected with an artist's aesthetic vision.
However, she does not seem to believe that 'drawing and making' will procure or
elevate the aesthetics of her art. Rather, she seems to hold that familiar
creative methodologies can restrict free creative visions and make for a more
unnatural artistic world. The methods that she has chosen instead are shaman
and 'the ethereal space.' Herself as a spiritual medium bestowing life to
material forms and the space(work room) as the mother womb upon which life is
thus bestowed... This is the starting point of the exhibition. Kim has given
the exhibition the title of "Soon-im Kim's 생날 씨앗들." "I look at my job as
that of a 'traveling farmer.' I think of myself as someone who finds common
things that are hidden all around and takes care of them, nurtures and helps
them grow, waiting for them to bear fruit, and then sharing that fruit with
others," she says. Those who have been to her workroom should know that it
is like the cocoon of a silkworm, the web of a spider, a space germinating the
creation and production of images. The space is filled with countless traces of
'drawing and making,' drawing without being restricted by the drawing and
making without being restricted by the sculpture. As I have once said,
"Like an artist who has worked for several decades in the space, she sprouts
'temporality of space.' This 'temporality' is parasitic in the way mushrooms
parasitize rotten trees. The artist herself becomes an 'ethereal body' or
'ethereal space'." In Korean aesthetics, there is the concept of "all
life's logic," referring to the logic of nature by which all forms of life
are created and reproduced. Kim seems to have substituted her own body with
that of a tree. The exhibited artworks are in vivid existence as if to
aesthetically verify all life's logic. The tree branches symbolize the
temporality of thinking. Branches, large and small, hang from the space of the
workroom. Growing like ivies, they become sublime aesthetic metaphors.

Jong-gil Gim (Education Team
Manager, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art)

* A scene from Soon-im Kim's solo
exhibition. With her installation of all things created in the workroom, Kim
also talks about the time accumulated and other forms of life conceived there.